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RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

ravynos.com

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Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#191

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

joombaga wrote: post #59
eyelidlessness wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. Or even “Xpm install ___” doesn’t mean I want to update thousands of unrelated packages I’ve installed directly or transitively. Regardless of their semver compatibilities. Edit for people using macOS: if you want to install one thing without waiting to update unfold numbers of other things, hilariously Cakebrew (a GUI frontend for homebrew) will let you do that with homebrew as the package manager.

You can also set the HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_UPGRADE environment variable to avoid upgrades.

It will also break stuff for you. Homebrew doesn’t have versioned dependencies, so I had, for example, my nodejs broken for me when libicu got updated from 69 to 70 without also updating nodejs. Homebrew index doesn’t take such things into account at all.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#192

Post by salmo »

pjmlp wrote: post #145
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Objective-C is done, time to move on” … except for Apple themselves, where we still see a steep rise in ObjC year over year with no visible sign of slowing that incline. Likewise for AppKit. Apple, the “do as we say, not as we do” company.

Except several systems have been rewritten in Swift for Ventura, also mentioned in other talks. Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.

It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic.

I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other.

From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either.

And rewriting software in a new language is always going to get back burnered by delivering new features. Until there’s a fundamental change they want that justifies a rewrite, a codebase is staying in its current language due to inertia.

Heck, companies will lie to themselves about these things. My favorite is this pattern

Execs: We’re all going to X!

Crowd: Yaaay. [Some project leads look at each other with a mix of sarcasm and fear.]

Initiative kicks off. Swag is distributed. Projects are identified.

Exec: [Looks at $] Well, except this one. And that one… Ok, we’ll replace all of these [waves arms] in 3-5 years.

Narrator: 3-5 years continues to be relative to the current date.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#194

Post by drums8787 »

still_grokking wrote: post #53
fsw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PLEASE NOTE: On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals. A very early UI on the new WindowServer is starting to take shape as of 2022-07-27. Thanks for your patience as we work to make ravynOS the best possible version.

Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

Sure, a certain amount of good luck is always required.

I've been involved in two rewrites during the past 5 years. While the rewrites were not by choice (one was forced by Flash EOL), in both cases there were multiple, very obvious (after the fact) benefits:

- Better, modern technology top to bottom

- Better dev process, facilitated by the better technology

- An excuse to focus functionally, and rethink. We couldn't possibly reproduce a heap of legacy features and were forced to focus on what mattered, and managed to offer those key features in a far superior way.

Done right, a rewrite can be fantastic. And sure, rewrites often happen for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#195

Post by grishka »

adastra22 wrote: post #2

This looks like not a reskin of an existing FreeBSD or Linux windows system, but an actual reimplementation of macOS. Very interesting if they can pull it off! I wonder though, why start with old Objective-C cocoa APIs instead of Swift?

Objective-C is the ABI of all UI-related macOS frameworks and it would probably always be. Even if you're writing in Swift, as long as you're using AppKit, you're using Objective-C classes under the hood. There's no such thing as "Swift Cocoa APIs". And SwiftUI is an abstraction layer on top of, again, AppKit/UIKit/WatchKit, which are themselves all written in Objective-C.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#196

Post by grishka »

chrismsimpson wrote: post #102
eyelidlessness wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Cocoa is that language specific or if it’s become legacy tech. When Swift was announced and when I explored it for personal projects, I was very much calling Cocoa APIs. They definitely catered to ObjC-isms, but my impression was that all of the underlying UI frameworks were being preserved even if they might gain additive APIs to be used less awkwardly in Swift.

SwiftUI is an intermediate step in this transition. Expect the UIKit/AppKit bits to eventually disappear.

Except SwiftUI is itself built on top of AppKit/UIKit.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#197

Post by whywhywhywhy »

still_grokking wrote: post #53
fsw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PLEASE NOTE: On 2022-02-14, we decided to abandon the current path of using X11/KDE desktop components and write from scratch a new UI that will align better with our goals. A very early UI on the new WindowServer is starting to take shape as of 2022-07-27. Thanks for your patience as we work to make ravynOS the best possible version.

Oh, the good old "rewrite the world" approach. Good luck to the developers!

If your goal is to replicate the UI quality of MacOS, then just reskinning the work of others will only result in inconsistent jank.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#198

Post by netr0ute »

oleganza wrote: post #124

I don't get it. The landing page promises finesse and then the very first screenshot displays horror typography and UI a-la linux 1998. https://ravynos.com/images/airyx_0.3_installer_confirm.png

The website didn't actually claim they had implemented those features yet, just that it's their goals.

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#199

Post by tasuki »

jetpackjoe wrote: post #18

Being able to CMD+c to copy things in a terminal is one of my favorite things about programming on a Mac. Ctrl+c to copy everywhere, except the terminal (there it instead is an interrupt) is a major annoyance working in Linux

It isn't an annoyance for me: just select text and paste it with middle click? Why bother with ctrl+c ?

Re: RavynOS – Finesse of macOS, freedom of FreeBSD

#200

Post by bigbizisverywyz »

salmo wrote: post #192
pjmlp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except several systems have been rewritten in Swift for Ventura, also mentioned in other talks. Besides this is nothing new in the industry, some Android business units and Windows ones, are quite adverse to touch anything besides C++, regardless of the guidelines to the rest of us.

It’s also funny to think of companies like Apple, MS, etc. as having 1 opinion or even tactic. I know they say it. But they’re made up of 100s-1000s of groups. And at Apple especially, many of these groups are not allowed to talk to each other. From the outside it’s easy to see companies that way. But if you’ve ever been inside a large company, you know what I’m talking about. That’s not unique to tech, either. And r…

.net being a good example of this

I'm sure I still have CD case with 'Windows .net' printed on it which contains Windows 2000 and SQL Server... .net?

The marketers really went to town on that one, would have loved to be in the creative pitch meetings for that swag.

'.net, what is it??'

'Who knows??! But if we print .net in multicolour on enough stuff, somebody might figure it out!'

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